Searches of the World Wide Web and even enterprise level content management systems typically return an overwhelming number of “hits” (stored artifacts such as documents that contain all or part of a search string or terms related to the search string). This makes it difficult in most searches for a user to examine the comprehensive list of hits to select a document for retrieval. Thus, the ranking of search results plays an important role in search systems. Ranking allows a search system to present hits to a user in order of likely relevance to facilitate selection by the user of an artifact from the large number of hits.